Laborfest: Australian Movies on Coal Miners & Labor Filmmaking

“I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” playwright Lillian Hellmann told the anti-Communist witchhunters of the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC.

This is essentially the theme of this entire outstanding Labor Film and Video Festival, and is the specific theme of the second Australian film in this set of two films:

(1) Lock Out (56 min) 2007 (Australia), By Jason Van Genderen
The year 1929 was one of the darkest chapters in Australian industrial history. There was a brutal effort to crush the strong labor movement in Northern Coalfields of New South Wales. During this dark period, 10,000 miners found themselves locked out of their Hunter Valley coal mines in a bitter industrial dispute over pay rates. What began as an undeclared war on industrial labor ended up overpowering a government, crippling an industry and besieging a community. This event challenged the rights of every Australian, and redefined the political and industrial landscape of a country that witnessed an event forever remembered as “The Great Australian Lockout.”
http://www.lockout.tv/
http://www.goodeyedeer.com.au/doco-Lockout.htm

(2) The Archive Project - The Realist Film Unit in Australia (98 min) 2006 (Australia)By John Hughes
This film shows the history of a group of politically conscious Melbourne Australian filmmakers who produce labor films about the lives of working people in the midst of the cold war. As a result of their work, they were hounded in a witch-hunt by the corporate press and the lessons of this experience are relevant today.
http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue72/8068
See also:
http://www.laborfest.net/2008schedule.htm